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And his tribe is growing. In a world that’s shrinking fast, and shying away from engaging talent for “Things that may happen”, the tribe that is willing to offer their services for money and a limited period of time, is slowly and surely scaling up.

But do you know, the freelancer was originally used to describe a warrior.

Oh yes, that’s right. In the era where lances were a formidable weapon, a warrior who offered his services to the highest bidder, without preference to ideology or camp or partisanship of any kind, was called a free lance.

Today, the lance is replaced by tools of the profession.

The warrior bit hasn’t gone away, though. The freelancer of today still fights competition for the organization that has hired him.

The days of yore saw a freelancer carry his tools of trade from camp to camp. They were the lance, a horse, his armor and personal belongings. Today too, things aren’t different. If you visit any co-working space, or coffee shop, the tools of today’s freelancer become all too visible. Internet connectivity, powerful laptops, smartphone, tablets, all of which are used the freelancer to deliver their services to their customers.

A freelancer is bound to an organization by the pay, and not necessarily by the ideology or other parameters. They won’t quit a battle while they’re so engaged, but no war is theirs. They are around to help only with battles. They prefer it that way, and want no part of any war that needs continued engagement of ideology, passion and cause. The freelancer of today, like the freelancer of yore, is wedded to the skill, and not the cause that his skill is used for.

Continued engagement doesn’t interest a freelancer. When his money is made, a freelancer has no enemy nor friends when it comes to skills. They work equally for both, and against both, depending on what the challenges are and what the remunerations of engaging for the challenge are.

There are times, a freelancer fights for no money. This is just to test their mettle and keep themselves away from the rust of monotonous tasks. Like the warrior of yore, the freelancer of today also likes to do this once a while, to learn new methods, processes, ways of working and so on.

And this tribe is growing, slowly and steadily.

We at FlexiPort wish this tribe all success in the year 2018, and commit to growing opportunities for this awesome bunch of people who are skilled, and proud enough to promote it, make their revenues, and then ride off into the next project.